Taking the First Step Blog

Hi, I’m Nika. Physicist. SnowBoardGames co-founder. Kickstarter creator. An advocate for efficiency. Climber. And since recently, a mom.

The SnowBoardGames story started in 2021, in the midst of covid lockdown, with a physicist, who had a fulfilling job in aviation, but who came to understand that if I want to be successful in life, ‘just’ physics won’t be enough, because it will never give me the independence I realised I wanted from life.

I needed another set of skills, which would help me navigate the changing world, and give me the ability to create something.

So together with Blaž, my awesome life partner, a fellow board-gamer, climbing partner, and a civil engineer, we founded SnowBoardGames and decided to launch a husky-themed board game on Kickstarter, to learn about crowdfunding.

The campaign took off way better than we dared to hope – 3451 backers helped us raise almost €120,000. We knew right away that we wanted to publish more games, but we were conflicted, because we did not want to leave our professional fields, physics and engineering, which we are passionate about too. And we wanted to still have free time, to climb, be in the mountains, snowboard, and play board games with friends and family.

We decided to do all 3. And if things weren’t complicated enough, I enrolled on a PhD in 2022, because I wanted to deepen my knowledge of numerical simulations.

So for the past few years, we have been working in physics & engineering from Monday to Thursday, and running SnowBoardGames – theoretically on Fridays, but usually on week afternoons and rainy weekends – and enjoying 3-day weekends filled with travelling and being outdoors.

It has been a crazy journey. We’ve met amazing people. We’ve learned so much about business and crowdfunding, and about game design. We’ve had periods with a lot of free time and ones where we were pulling all-nighters. We’ve had the ups. We’ve had the crashes. But most of all, it’s been an exciting journey of personal growth.

I enjoy writing, so I’ve been documenting parts of our journey. If you are interested, I warmly invite you to join us. This blog is my personal outlet, where you will find posts about personal growth (this is a major one), intertwined with reflections about business (written from the perspective of someone from a tech career, who is learning about business and balancing it on the side), and crowdfunding (from someone who’s launched and fulfilled successful campaigns). And, of course, sprinkled with board games.

The first cycle of posts is from 2021/2022, when we were launching our first Kickstarter campaign. Then, there was a long gap, because I started my PhD journey, was probably on a road to burnout, took a break from SnowBoardGames, turned 30, got married, had a crisis, and, it seems, finally found balance between physics, SnowBoardGames and free time in 2025, when the new posts start.

Some highlights:

  • If you’re interested in how it all began, start here, and if you want to hear a story behind the SnowBoardGames name, check out this one.
  • If you’re thinking about launching your own Kickstarter campaign, definitely check out this one  and this one.
  • If you are thinking about sharing your story, but you can’t decide, I had the same dilemma, and I shared some thoughts here. And if you’re thinking about starting an endeavour, but you can’t get yourself to actually start, I analysed my process here, and I wish you all the best with your project!

Tackling the causality dilemma

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You know the dilemma of which came first, the chicken or the egg? We had a bit of a similar dilemma with art and promotion. And if the first one is easy to answer if one bends the context a little — eggs were obviously first, as the dinosaurs had them — we were dealing with the second one in practice, so we needed a solution that we could actually execute, not just some smart-ass theoretical answer. The dilemma presented […]

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Kick-starting a Kickstarter campaign

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Yes, I’d backed one or two projects before. No, we didn’t have the slightest idea of how to do a Kickstarter campaign. And most importantly, we knew that. So we started gathering information. Kickstarter officially came to Slovenia in October 2020, three months before the SnowBoardGames project was born. My colleague who knew I was interested in the platform forwarded the news to me, and after that, it really went viral within my community. A bunch of Slovene projects also

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Committing

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You know that moment, when you are standing on the edge of a cliff, preparing to jump into the water below? You want to jump, but you also kind of don’t want to at the same time. You take a step towards the edge, but then falter and decide not to jump just yet. You take a step back, away from the open blue, back towards safety, and feel a swap of disappointment that you didn’t do it. So you

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Searching for the perfect project

Searching for the perfect project

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… is a guaranteed way to never actually start one. I told you in my previous blog that I realised that I needed to start hacking life — rethink what success means to me, and plot a course that would take me there. I knew immediately that in the process, I would have to find a project that would allow me to create something out of nothing and to be a platform for developing new skills. But I didn’t know

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Taking the first step to hacking life

Taking the first step to hacking life

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Back in college, a friend told me that his life plan was to study something interesting, find an awesome project to work on, make a ton of money with it and retire at the age of 30. He was a few years older than me, studying in the field of engineering, and he was one of the smartest people I knew, so I was pretty convinced he had it all figured out. The idea of retiring at 30 seemed quite

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